‘Once and for all, I’ve declared myself against life and people, on the side of otherness and indifference, isolation, the mineral beauty of the nonhuman world’—so says a character in ‘High in the Mountains’, speaking in the voice of alienation.
‘All we see of the mentally ill’, says Carl Jung, ‘regarding them from the outside, is their tragic destruction, rarely the life of that side of the psyche which is turned away from us.’ Kavan shows us the hidden side, and it has its beauty, as it struggles to make sense of an illogical world. Extracts similar to the ones quoted above can be taken almost at random from Kavan’s writings, showing her alienation, her madness.
Yet, as her friend Raymond Marriott warns us, she was in many ways an ordinary and pleasant creative person, chic, generally fun to be with. The fiction remains at least at arm’s length from the facts of her life. Writers have many reasons for using a persona not entirely congruent with their own natures, for fact is more complex than fiction. What rises from the printed page is part of an elaborate game of hide-and-seek which a writer plays, perhaps unconsciously, not necessarily with the reader but with herself or himself. Kavan is dextrous in the use of symbols, and symbols are easily mistaken for the real thing.
Although she often looked outwards with a shrewd and witty eye—’the church clock is calling the hour again in its dull voice’, as she says in ‘My Madness’, and we have all heard that particular chime—all roads lead back, like the strands of a web, to the spider of her self-obsession.
Yet hers is not a fiction of claustrophobia. The prose is too fine-spun for that. Her longing for abstraction takes refuge in its symbols: Madness, Ice, China—as one should say Trial, Castle, America. Her narcissism flew to another universe, ethereal and ‘on the side of otherness’. Hence Kavan’s great attraction, that she sees beyond the personal to an impersonal infinity. She is not a victim but a creator, not a mad thing but a winged thing.
Her literary evolution is of remarkable interest. Born somewhere at the turn of the century (the imprecision is necessary, for she would never reveal her age), she was then plain Helen Edmonds. That did not satisfy her. A divine discontent was on the move in her.
The chilly sexuality in the novel Let Me Alone, in its very title, perhaps conveys something of what was happening to Helen Edmonds. In that novel, Anna is the protagonist, taken to the East against her wish. Findlay, Anna’s lover, finally holds her in his arms. The night of the country now called Sri Lanka is about them. ‘For the moment, she was open to him.’ Yet they do nothing; not so much as a kiss is exchanged. The isolation is unbridgeable. ‘They were in different worlds.’
That seems to have been a lifelong problem, not merely for the fictional Anna but also for the real one.
After the ineffectual encounter with Findlay, Anna is raped by her husband, Matthew. She suffers atrociously, yet her spirit remains cold; ‘nor did he ever become real to her’.
The sense of unreality, perhaps the heart of symbolism, was a lifelong problem. And here indeed the fictional character—as a vampire is supposed to take over the living—becomes imposed upon the form of the author.
A contemporary reader of Let Me Alone feels a shock when the irreconcilable Matthew and Anna are introduced at an up-country club in Burma as ‘Mr and Mrs Kavan’. The very words seem ill-assorted. But Let Me Alone was first published in 1930, and the author’s name on the title page given as Helen Ferguson.
Helen Ferguson evidently felt that she had defined herself in the character of Anna, who so courts yet fears isolation. Shortly thereafter, her own marriage failing, she encountered the writings of Franz Kafka, and changed her name by deed poll to that of the character she had invented, Anna Kavan. Art inundated nature.
This change of name, so full of masochism and pride, followed a period in a mental hospital, the period brilliantly defined in ‘My Madness’. It represented a transformation, the crossing of a frontier away from the real. Anna Kavan had converted herself, as writers sometimes do, but rarely so deliberately. From now on, the realm of fantasy commanded her, and she it.
The discontinuity of personality is reflected in the discontinuities of Kavan’s prose. The prose is always lucid, without latinate constructions, without long words or literary allusions; the complexity lies in what is omitted. Often the discontinuities are nothing short of terrifying, as for instance in some of the stories in the collection Julia and the Bazooka, made soon after Kavan’s death. That is to say, they may terrify the reader, although to the ‘I’ character they are merely the stuff of life. Living somewhere on an unnamed continent, you may find friends turn into tigers.
Much of the strength of the laconically entitled story, ‘A Visit’, in that same collection, derives from the proffered discontinuity of its opening sentence: ‘One hot night a leopard came into my room and lay down on the bed beside me’. We are at once in the unknown territory of the Douanier Rousseau, where communication between human and animal happens as punctually as the full moon.
‘A Visit’ dispels the notion that Anna Kavan’s writings are merely depressing. Such is not the case; and the luminosity of even the dark pieces gives light enough. In her sudden transitions of mood and feeling we see the kinship with Kafka, and perhaps even something of that concealed humour which was Charles Dickens’s gift to Kafka.
Many people are surprised to learn that when Kafka first read extracts from The Trial to Max Brod and their circle of friends, he could sometimes hardly continue for laughter. Similarly, Chekhov was first played outside his own country for tragedy, not comedy. Kavan’s reputation is at present for gloom, madness and paranoia. Not undeservedly. Yet the whisper of mocking laughter is often to be heard, even in the sybilline ‘Sleep Has His House’.
Kavan in person, too, did not always project her shadowed side. In conversation with her English publisher, Peter Owen—it’s to be doubted if there would be an Anna Kavan without a Peter Owen—I said something of this kind, having enjoyed her friendly company. Owen agreed. It took a while to see through the camouflage of normality; or perhaps, human nature being so diverse, one should rather say that the camouflage of tortured romanticism concealed much that was no more or less than normal. In either event, Anna was of smart, cheerful appearance. She enjoyed male company.
Neither in her appearance nor her behaviour did she reveal her incurable heroin addiction. As Peter Owen admits, it was a while before the fact of that addiction dawned on him.
When I met her, towards the end of her life, I too knew nothing of the heroin. By then, she had been on the habit for some thirty years. Heroin was her accomplice, her truce with reality. I saw only another dedication: to literature, and to that I responded.
Raymond Marriott, another long-term friend of Anna’s, emphasizes her worldly, everyday side, reminding us that she was a good gardener, an excellent painter, and a skilled designer of small houses.
* * *
Anna was friendly and welcoming, in the small house of her own design in Hillgate Street, in the Kensington district of London. I had selected Ice as the best science fiction novel of 1967, less from any firm conviction that it was science fiction, or from a desire to dismay rivals, than to draw attention to a splendid piece of writing which might have been overlooked in the face of more noisy claimants for public attention. We talked in the ordinary way of two strangers wanting to get to know each other, and I gave her a novel of mine which, I felt, also operated in the same regions of otherness as Ice.
Anna had some complaint about Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, for whom she had worked in the war years. He could have been more supportive of her with regard to her own writing, she felt. It was the sort of remark anyone might make. She longed to have a reputation, and thought that perhaps my attention marked a new start; she liked the idea of being regarded as a science fiction writer. It sounded modern. One sees in her work the sort of modernism—love